Dave Cook is New York photojournalist who specializes in food writing and photography, which he practices primarily through his blog, Eating in Translation. He recently visited the Bay Area to cram a bunch of "work" into a week's visit. This mostly involved eating at a host of the best (and some of the not-so-best) of the Bay's hidden gems and international treasures, taking pictures of said gems and treasures, and writing about them.
Dave is back in New York now, where we tracked him down with a list of questions via e-mail; his patient answers are after the jump. You can read his detailed impressions of the Bay Area food scene on his blog.
MP: What was your overall favorite meal in the Bay Area, and why?
The salty duck, eel with leeks, shrimp stir-fried with egg and mushrooms, and salt-and-pepper Dungeness at Bund. With an asterisk: I don't eat many whole meals when I'm out food hunting, especially out of town, when time is tight; usually I cherry-pick and move on. At Bund, though, I had the chance to reconnect with two friends who'd moved out this way from New York; one had founded the Vietnamese Food Dining Out Group on Meetup.com, which has evolved into the World Food Lover's Dining Out Group that I organize now. After arriving in San Francisco just that afternoon, I was very happy to linger.
MP: What was the most surprising dish you ate?
I'm pretty tough to surprise. Perhaps those curious eggs at the International Lao Market in Oakland: The contents are emptied, roasted with salt, pepper, and who knows what, then returned to their shells.
MP: Did anything severely disappoint? Please elaborate.
My biggest swing-and-a-miss was at Nieves Cinco de Mayo, near the Fruitvale BART station, where I arrived at the ostensible opening hour and couldn't wait for it to actually open. I would have loved to try the hawthorn gelato and arrayan sorbet. Of things I actually tried, the burrito at Taqueria El Castillito was a letdown. My dining buddy, Charles Hodgkins of BurritoEater, observed that this was an off-day for the taqueria.
MP: Coming from New York, where did you see the biggest differences in the restaurant scenes in our cities? What about the way the average person relates to food service and restaurants?
In San Francisco, the volume level on the restaurant buzz is turned way down. In New York there's a virtual (that is, online) foodie scrum, cross-posted from website to website, surrounding every incremental development at any number of see-and-be-seen restaurants; you see many more folks in New York snapping pictures of their food, too. That media overexposure affects the venues, and the diners, too; especially under increasing constraints of time and money, there's a lot of pressure to "get it right" that detracts from the simple enjoyment of getting together.
MP: Which restaurant are you sad not to have in New York?
Angkor Borei, in the Mission, and Green Papaya, in Oakland.
MP: You're into exotic cuisines, it seems. What could you find in SF that you can't get easily in NYC? Does the Bay Area do any specific cuisine particularly well? Particularly poorly?
Cambodian and Lao cuisine isn't common in the Bay Area, but it's even tougher to track down good renditions of certain dishes in New York; San Francisco is also home to several riffs and regional variations of Vietnamese that we don't have back East. For overall breadth and depth, though, New York has the clear advantage (granted, with a much larger population); South American, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern quickly come to mind.
Eating In Translation [Official Site]
[Photo: Via Eating in Translation/flickr]
